As Alexa and Cortana kicked off a conversation more awkward than the worst Tinder date and Visual Studio 15.8 dropped into the hands of delighted developers, what else happened last week at Microsoft?
Your Phone is here! Oh no it isn't! Oh yes it is!
Someone in Redmond is having to spend time on the naughty step as the Android …

2919

Re: 2919

To be honest it depends on how the 2032 thing pans out.

For me 1999 was the first year of the Linux desktop. OK, year of the Linux console - it took me a while to configure XFree86 and work out how to get a window manager together. God it looked crap compared to what I'm typing this on: sysadmins should not have to work with typeface choices and anti aliasing was not exactly a thing.

900 more years of Windows 'health warnings' then it is :XD

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

A + B <> C

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

A:

"Microsoft Chairman Thompson expressed distaste for companies whose ad-financed businesses share or sell user data, while declining to comment on Facebook Inc. specifically. “Many of them make money off Ads and they have used that (user data) as kind of a leverage point,” he said “At Microsoft, we don’t believe in that.” Microsoft Corp. Chairman John Thompson

"Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella: It's important for tech companies to “self-police” or build the tools that create transparency, make sure that people's privacy is protected.” - "Nadella spoke forcefully in favor of .... the privacy of customer data."

....."When we talk about why we're upgrading the Windows 10 install base, why is that upgrade free? MS CFO asked during a meeting with Wall Street analysts. These are all new monetization opportunities once a PC is sold. Microsoft's strategy is to go low on consumer Windows licenses, hoping that that will boost device sales, which will in turn add to the pool of potential customers for 'Advertising'".....

....."CEO Nadella has referred to the customer revenue potential as 'lifetime value' in the past -- and did so again last week during the same meeting with Wall Street -- hinting at Microsoft's strategy to make more on the back end of the PC acquisition process. The more customers, the more money those customers will bring in as they view 'Ads'".....

Re: 900 more years of Windows 'health warnings' then it is :XD

As often happens at MS, they could have switched direction at the very wrong moment... they saw the shitloads of money FB and Google were making with ads, but coudn't see the data hoarding scandals, and the obvious reaction, even in a very business friendly country like US.

Yet the GDPR was approved two years ago, and they should be very careful about what they collect and why.

Windows 10 could become a big failure one day, maybe well before 2918.

Running MS apps on Android

It's useful to have Skype on my phone so I can get and respond to messages when away from my desk at work.

It works okay for the most part, but why oh why doesn't it time stamp the messages received? And sometimes I click on a message notification and the notification just disappears without the app opening, leaving me to launch it again and look for the message. And Outlook is just as randomly quirky and laggy as it is on my PC at times.

So it appears that MS has gone to great pains to ensure mobile users have the same experience as desktop users of their products. Too bad it's not a good one overall though.

Re: Sticky notes pre-dates WinXP

as long as it doesn't show up as part of a desktop package under Linux, with ".Not" aka Mono dependencies (like Tomboy - I can't say enough *BAD* things about *THAT* cluster-blank), I don't care about any 'sticky notes'. It just sounds like another 'gimmick feature' that will die a horrific death on its own, without any intervention.

Re: Sticky notes pre-dates WinXP

Nah, mate, Stickies started as a Desk accessory on Mac System 7.5 in 1994, seven years before XP was released.

The first stickies-like program I ever used was Borland Sidekick from 1984, an MS-DOS TSR (Terminate and Stay Resident) application that allowed you to have 9 'stickies' (i.e. 9 files open in a notepad-like app).

Re: Skype texting

Skype could text then MS took over ....

Before MS took on Skype we'd been able to send text from Skype from both the desktop and Android for years. As soon as MS took over the texting to mobiles stopped and was removed from the app completely.

This year MS have put it back in after much abuse from those of us who used to rely on it asking why they had removed it. However, up until last month it wasn't actually sending texts. I had to get a refund from them from all the texts they had charged me for that were never received.

I then found out that they had also removed essential account configuration from the Skype Out service, such as show my telephone number when I SMS. This had to be recreated because they had removed the service.

So Skype has done SMS for years, who cares about the other apps when you're a Linux user through and through. Keep Skype, dump the rest.

Skype??

Re: Skype??

They've not killed it yet?

MS are really trying hard to kill it but there are a lot of stubborn users and very large corporations out there that like it.

Typical, they remove a number of ages old features and see who shouts loudests and grudgingly restores the most popular ones. But they'll carry on and eventually many users will just give up and then they can extinguish it only for it to be re-invented in a plethora of sub standard products in the future.

Re: Skype??

They used to love that feature "spun out in to a different product" press release. Removing IMs from Exchange 2003 for example, and the utter chaos they caused by trying to remove public folders from Exchange 2007 and forcing everyone to SharePoint with no direct or easy migration path.

"Didn't realise it was still going"

Sure. Most of the alternatives - including Skype 8 - are designed for youths with more fingers than neurons, so they're not really useful when you need some work done, compared to chatting without any real reason but killing time and avoid to awake the few neurons...